Bitterest Age CL

Though he garnered acclaim for the comic Ride a Cockhorse and the dark Lulu Incognito , Kennedy is unlikely to win new readers with this novel of faith and hope set during the last years of WW II. Ingeborg Maas, 10, her six-year-old brother Andreas, and their mother Ursula, live in Potsdam, having fled the bombings of Berlin. The ravages of war--air raids, shortages of food and heat--have made their lives into daily nightmares. Most disturbingly, Ursula and Ingeborg's letters to paterfamilias Walter have been returned from the Eastern front unopened. As their situation worsens and the Soviet armies draw nearer, Ingeborg refuses to leave, believing that her steadfast faith in his return will keep her father alive. Ingeborg is self-centered in a typically childish way, but her egotism is fed both by her mother's unending, rather annoying praise (``She knows how to iron!'' ``She stands in place for me in queues at the food shop and never complains. She helps in a hundred ways. She's my little hero.'') and by the approbation of Nazis and aristocrats alike, who clearly take pride in her blonde, blue-eyed echt deutsch looks. Often Kennedy's precise, stiff language seems a little Prussian and more than a little awkward: ``When it came time at last for Walter Maas to embark on the troop train, Ursula began to show tears, so Andreas began also to cry.'' It's a fascinating time and place, but novelists like Heinrich Boll and diarists like Marie Vassiltchikov afford more moving portraits. (Apr.)